Famous Single-Origin Teas: Darjeeling, Assam, Keemun, Dragon Well and Ceylon

Only tea from the district’s 87 registered gardens can be sold as Darjeeling, and in 2004 it became India’s first Geographical Indication. Most of it is made as a light, aromatic black tea, and it changes with the season: first flush teas in spring are floral and brisk, and second flush teas in summer carry the famous grape-like muscatel flavor. Darjeeling first and second flush are two of the most prized black teas in the world.

It is also small. Our training deck puts the total area under tea at 17,820 hectares and annual production at only 8 to 9 million kg, grown from about 90 to 2,050 meters above sea level, with 3,000 to 3,300 mm of rain a year.

How we taste it

We taste our way through every Darjeeling season: our tasters reckoned they had sampled close to 11,456 Darjeeling cups by late October 2022.

That tasting is also how we judge a year. After sampling over 1,578 cups of the spring 2022 harvest, our founder, Kausshal Dugarr, concluded that the First Flush 2022 did not compare with the past few years: in quality and flavor, “it lacks the soul of Darjeeling teas.”

Tasting is also the only safe test of origin. Nepal grows its tea just across the border, and its black tea is good, though not the same in taste as Darjeeling: an attractive and less expensive complement that is typically slightly softer and a little woodier. The blending of Darjeeling and Nepal tea is an old affair, so a market “Darjeeling” may well contain some Nepal leaf. Buying by estate and invoice, as we do, is how you avoid that.

More in Darjeeling tea and Second flush tea and muscatel, or browse all our Darjeeling teas.

It brews a strong, brisk, malty cup, deep amber to reddish, which is why it is the backbone of most breakfast blends and of Indian chai. The finest are the golden-tipped summer teas of the second flush, rich and smooth enough to drink on their own.

It is also India’s workhorse. Our training deck notes that Assam contributes more than 50% of India’s total tea, that its teas are used extensively for “Breakfast teas/chais” and to increase the blend strength and color of other teas, and that with milk an Assam makes “a bright yellowish-orange cup.”

The best single estates show what the blends leave out. When our master tasters and procurement managers sampled Mangalam Gold Summer Black at four oxidation times in 2021, they chose 3 hours 30 minutes for “a perfect combination of strength, briskness with notes of maple syrup and hints of cocoa.” Peter Keen, writing for us, suggested a really good Assam, “such as a Halmari,” for anyone who wants a strong tea that gives a “Ruler of the Universe feeling even at dawn’s bleary light.”

Read Assam tea, try Assam Mangalam Gold Summer Black or Halmari Summer Black, or browse all our Assam teas.

The story goes that in 1875 a man named Hu Yuanlong traveled to Fujian to learn how black tea was made, and came home to Qimen to make his own.

Inside a blend, Keemun is the refined note. Peter Keen, writing for us in 2016, said it adds “a lighter, smoky overtone” to English Breakfast and that “Keemun signals a superior tea. It is the most subtle of the main choices for the blend.” He also suggested drinking it on its own as “a wonderful tea, if you want something a little lighter in its flavors.”

Because it is subtle, it does not want boiling water. Keen’s advice for “a Darjeeling or subtle China Keemun” is 205°F (about 96°C), “around half a minute off the boil.” We do not sell Keemun ourselves.

Longjing is one of the prized “famous teas” that are still plucked and made largely by hand, and its leaves are fixed slowly in hot pans for two to three minutes, which gives a soft, light-to-medium-bodied cup. The best is picked in spring, before the rains; Tea 101 called it a good example of a first flush green tea, “rich with crisp spring flavors”: in a word, fresh.

It grows in the hills around Hangzhou in Zhejiang, one of the southern provinces, with Fujian and Anhui, where most of China’s green tea is made. Our 2017 lesson on Asian green tea explains why it tastes as it does: pan-firing, an action “akin to stir-frying,” gives Chinese greens yellower leaves and a taste that “tends toward the vegetal, nutty and floral,” where Japan’s steamed greens are vivid green and marine. Read A short lesson on Asian green tea.

For how Chinese and Indian teas differ, see Indian vs Chinese tea, and for green tea in general, What is green tea?

And Japan?

Japan’s famous teas are steamed greens. In 1738 the tea producer Soen Nagatani invented the method of fixing the leaf by steaming rather than frying, and regular sencha now accounts for about 70% of the green tea produced in Japan. Shade-grown tencha, used for gyokuro and matcha, is among the few Japanese teas still hand-picked. The ritual drinking of tea in Japan, Chado or the way of tea, has existed for over 500 years. To taste a shade-grown tea, try our Pure Matcha Green Tea.

Ceylon was a coffee country until a fungus wiped out its coffee between 1869 and 1878, and tea took its place. In 1890 a Glasgow grocer, Thomas Lipton, stepped off a ship in Colombo, bought tea estates, and sold their tea “direct from the tea garden to the teapot,” making Ceylon a household name.

The brand Lipton built is still news. When Unilever put the brand on the block in 2021, it was the world’s largest tea brand and 131 years old, and its founder’s story began in Glasgow, where he was born on 10 May 1850 to Irish parents who had fled the potato famine.

Ceylon’s black teas are the mellow partner to Assam in the original English Breakfast, as Tea 101 tells it, and its highland white teas are renowned too. One of them, the silver-needle white tea of Adam’s Peak, is grown on 60-degree slopes and limited to about 3,000 pounds a year; a 2017 guest post on our blog called it the first white tea made outside China. Read Adam’s Peak: Higher and higher, better and better.

The island is a large producer of orthodox tea: nearly 300 million kg a year, about 5% of all the world’s tea, of which it exported 95% before its economic crisis, earning about US$1.3 billion a year. For a named estate to start with, Peter Keen suggested in 2016 that if you want “that big wake-up burst of taste, a Ceylon Kenilworth is as inexpensive as a branded tea bag.”

In a 2021 roundup of the world’s most expensive teas, the top one was valued at “around a whopping $1.2 million per kg,” and Da Hong Pao, produced only in Wuyishan, Fujian, was named as “often regarded as the most expensive in the world.”

India’s most expensive teas

India’s own entry on that list was a Darjeeling: our Badamtam Moonlight White, a spring white tea from the Lebong Valley, then sold at about $2,800 per kg. It is still in our range as Darjeeling Badamtam Spring Moonlight White.

Its product record explains the price. It is made in limited quantities from “a mix of the fragrant AV2, P126, and B157 clones,” its cup is champagne-colored, and our tasters found geranium, white lilies, raw mango and hints of muskmelon in the liquor.

Record prices are an old Darjeeling story. Arun Kumar Gomden, the veteran Darjeeling tea maker and master taster credited with naming the muscatel teas at Castleton in the mid-1980s, remembers what happened when that first muscatel batch went to auction: “it broke all records and created a new one. It sold at Rs. 583, a monumental figure, and only a week later it went on to create another record by selling at Rs. 1,460.” The tea, he says, “went on to be savored by the former Emperor of Japan, Hirohito.” Read The Muscatel Master.

And over Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024, when we shipped to 68 countries, the priciest tea we sold went for $3,500 per kg.